On the contrary, using Chinese characters makes the language more accessible to other Asian learners, due to many having some degree of formal study of the writing system. And in countries that don't use the latin alphabet, pinyin is no more useful than chinese characters--and if a person actually devotes time to studying, likely worse.
Having learned Japanese, after about a year of study, it's quite easy to guess the meaning of a word just by knowing the meaning of at least one character. As a native English speaker, there are still words that I encounter from time to time and I can't possibly guess what their meaning could be even with context.
That's because you picked Japanese as an example. If I pick Vietnamese that's the opposite, the Chinese characters are hiding the similarities of both languages to a non-initiate Vietnamese speaker. Japanese is maybe the only language which benefits from the current writing.
Not using hanzi makes learning language at the elementary level much easier, and many countries dropped use of them to improve literacy rates during their process into developed countries. But once your country is developed and education is good, hanzi has the advantage in that its fairly uniform and lets readers quickly understand new words even in different language.
I'm not sure it's a good argument to keep the current system just to make cool tattoos
> Who can forget that “tomorrow” is made up of “sun” and “moon” rising and setting, or that “rest” is a “person” leaning on a “tree”?
All of those second meanings are arbitrary so I don't get your point here, any other combination could have been picked up instead.
> 5. Chinese Characters allows the Chinese people to access their history and culture directly. Like most technology, backwards compatibility and not ease of learning is a good point for not switching to Pinyin. Switching to Pinyin would cut the Chinese people from thousands of year of culture and history.
That is maybe the best side of the Chinese Characters but again I doubt people can read ancient Chinese easily nowadays, they still need some small training, a lot of things changed during that time. And nothing of Latin or Greek is forgotten, the texts are studied in school.
> 6. Chinese characters promotes national unity and cohesiveness. The stature of Han Chinese as the largest national grouping in the world can be explained partially by the writing system. All literate Chinese, even if they speak mutually unintelligible “dialects”, can read the same books and feel that Chinese Characters is their own language
Does that even works properly in practice or do people have to specifically chose characters based on their mutual understanding?
> 4. The gap between colloquial speech and formal writing can be quite large. For Chinese to be written in Pinyin, Chinese writers would just have to avoid overly ambiguous vocabulary terms and devise some new standard replacements if it became necessary.
That's not really a great point because when people speak, these non-ambiguous spoken terms already need to exist anyway.
One point you might have not considered is giving up the characters might open-up a whole new world of internationalization of Chinese which would have a status similar to English nowadays, keeping the characters is preventing that.